2. Conduct an environmental audit and authorize a green committee.

Upon making this commitment, it is valuable to designate project leaders and authorize a “green committee” or “sustainability group” whose mandate is to help design the sustainability project, oversee its implementation, and coordinate actions thereafter.^[1] They should conduct an internal audit or environmental assessment of programs, curriculum, buildings and operations, and later monitor the application of new policies and procedures. “An environmental impact audit is equally useful– if not indispensable– as a starting point for larger [performing arts] institutions.” In her study of the emergence of sustainable theatre, Iphigenia Taxopoulou writes, “An environmental impact audit is equally useful– if not indispensable– as a starting point for larger [performing arts] institutions.”^[2]One approach to determining a baseline assessment is to measure how resources like energy and waste are used across the organization, with free and low-cost environmental footprint tools and advisory resources, like the Creative Green Tools; another is to review curriculum and production decision-making. This review process offers key knowledge to self-assess existing behaviors and systems, identify opportunities, prioritize areas for improvement and cost-related interventions, and later assess the progress and adjust targets. The recording and reporting of such data may also be relevant in the context where many are questioning if and how theatre and performance can find ways to be instrumental to the neo-liberal university, without becoming fully instrumentalized by it.^[3] Faced with the persistent, unrelenting discourse of austerity, such data measurement and modeling of change may be a creative way to redefine the ways that university administration recognises us, and understands our contributions to knowledge.

There are undoubtedly complexities to reducing environmental footprints in the campus context given limitations to operational control, and the fact that decision-making and budgets for buildings and waste procedures and energy sources are likely well beyond the jurisdiction of individual departments. If an environmental audit is pursued, that data can be used to advocate for more efficient and, at times, cost-savings strategies, and to align with emerging industry standards for environmental performance, and perhaps to even foster new or deeper collaborations with other invested interests on campus like an Office of Sustainability or Department of Engineering.^[4]